Madame Hyde

Isabelle Huppert excels in portraying characters who are often tightly wound with a hidden dark side, just brimming beneath the surface. Whether she is playing a video game CEO who is playing a dangerous game of seduction and violence with her rapist (Elle); a piano teacher who secretly engages in voyeurism at peepshows and porn cinemas (The Piano Teacher); or a postmistress who coerces a housemaid into murdering her bourgeois employers (La Cérémonie). Huppert never settles for characters with each morals or a transparent image, they always have to have a fascinating complication to them.

Huppert continues with this style of characterization in Madame Hyde, co-written and directed by Serge Bozon, a modern-day retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Huppert as a nervous and timid science teacher named Madame Guteil in a high school in the Paris suburbs. Guteil struggles to maintain control over her rambunctious students, who openly mock her and harass her because she cannot lead with confidence. The students are pent-up with boredom from wanting to perform physical experiments instead of listening to lectures, and, as they are ethnically diverse tech students, are considered by the school as being made for labor, not brains. And she is mocked by her colleagues when she attempts to defend herself against the school council criticizing her performance as a teacher.

Madame Guteil tries to psych herself up to lead her class, assuming her devoted husband’s advice of “Don’t let fear tense your body,” and telling herself, “A teacher doesn’t need to be liked, but understood.” Nevertheless, the students laugh at her, and make a fortuitous comparison between her and Spider-Man, in which they admire a fictional character more than they respect her as a real person.

As fate would have it, Madame Guteil is accidentally electrocuted by lightning in her home lab by the harvest moonlight, and, like Spider-Man, she has now been changed through a science accident. Her body stands more erect, and she emanates an inner glow that eventually encompasses her body like a radiation of her repressed anger.  Her alternate self, Mrs. Hyde, possesses her to the point of walking out in the middle of the night, glowing in her nightgown like a ghost of the Victorian Gothic era, with a distant look in her serene expression.

Her transformation infuses an authority in her, and she uses her newfound strength to guide her students into understanding critical thinking and problem solving for themselves, and learning how to explain scientific experiments for themselves. Guteil especially develops a mentoring relationship with her student Malik (Adda Senani, in an endearing and sweet performance), a handicapped teenage boy who dresses in track suits and is at both cocky and shy at the same time. He acts out in class out of boredom, outright sexually harassing Guteil to fit in with his peers, especially the hip-hop loving boys in his local housing projects, but as they are both the misfits targeted by their peers, they find a connection with one another. Malik admits that he acts out because “I’m scared of becoming someone like you. Someone weak.” Guteil takes it in stride, and gives him a private lesson in mathematics in her lab, teaching him how to think and develop logic for himself. And as Guteil gains the respect of her students, she transforms into a good teacher, shedding her fear and trepidation.

But despite the positive strengths of her transformation, her alternate self has a power that threatens to consume her innocent morals, and she cannot control what changes her from the inside, and what may have been her saving force may also be her personal destruction.

Madame Hyde is a decent film, and is a rare opportunity for Huppert to not only play an insecure character, but to present her humorous touches as well. Romain Duris, as the school principal, also relishes an opportunity to play against his bohemian type and play an awkwardly dorky administrator, with the ability to say ridiculous lines with a light comic sensibility.  Madame Hyde may not be a very memorable film in the scope of Isabelle Huppert’s catalog, especially with her recent critical successes of Things to Come and Elle, but it is an interesting and unusual film about a woman’s metaphysical transformation as a schoolteacher and beyond.